I really wasn’t a reader as a kid growing up in Labrador City.
The only experience I had with reading was what we were assigned in school. One I remember was The Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace about a doomed expedition that attempted to cut a trail through some of the gnarliest bush in central Labrador. Those crazy bastards were trying to reach Ungava Bay. New Yorkers. When they were starving to death, they boiled their belts for sustenance.
That’s a detail you don’t forget.
The only other thing I remember reading in Labrador was An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a short story by the Civil War-era American writer Ambrose Bierce. That story ruined my life. In that, during my darkest days, riddled with crippling anxiety, I had strange thoughts like I’d already died somewhere along the way and this consciousness was just some wild hallucination. You probably don't need to read that one.
Kurt Vonnegut called it the greatest short story written by an American, and maybe he's right. Incidentally, Ambrose Bierce died under mysterious circumstances in Mexico. So it goes.
The first book I ever read for pleasure was 1984 by George Orwell, when I was 22 and in J-School in Charlottetown, P.E.I. That’s exactly 20 years ago. It was recommended by my friend, who was also from Labrador and who by that time was starting to read for fun. My older brother was also starting to read. He had this crazy idea to read the Time Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century but got utterly hogtied by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He still talks about that book with some loathing.
During college, I started reading so-called Transgressive fiction, which includes Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Eason Ellis, Craig Clevenger, Douglas Coupland (not that Coupland is necessarily connected with those others).
I went to my college buddy as earnest as humanly possible and said, I’m sure, what any hardcore reader wants to hear: you got any book recommendations? My reading diet consisted of these Transgressive writers and writers who were journalists at one point or another: Orwell, Hemingway, Hunter Thompson. I didn’t have a particularly vivid imagination.
When I read Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, I felt like I’d discovered magic. Not least of all because there is literal magic in that book. I’d been raised on sit-coms, so the fact that a book didn’t have any commercials was itself fascinating.
When I was a journalist in Alberta, I read too much Kerouac and took four months to drive across Canada. For some reason, I also expected to find America in the 1950s, but instead found Canada in 2008. This trip was ostensibly so I'd go 'find myself' or something. But instead, I started having full-blown panic attacks. Doing 120. It was a hell of a summer.
As a community newspaper reporter in southern Labrador and then northern Newfoundland, I read books I really had little business reading and really didn't make heads or tales of. Classics, we'll say. Eventually, I drove back across the country to become a sports editor in Whitehorse, Yukon. Boy, I really knew how to run from my problems back then. Now I just lay around, breathing heavily. But back then, I had several boxes of books in my backseat and startlingly few clothes. I had a typewriter. I was one of those assholes.
All of which is to say I figured I'd start a book blog about revisiting books I read along the way. See how they hold up. See how well these books age, and to see if I've aged. At all.
Now, I’m an editor at a magazine in Toronto. I've probably changed less than I'd like to believe. But I did get rid of my typewriter. So it goes.
Jono
